No water, no power, hordes of birds: who will buy San Francisco’s $25m private island?

Chris Lim gazed across the water, perched at the hull of a small speedboat hurtling over choppy waves towards the only private island in the San Francisco bay.

The stony cliffs of Red Rock Island loomed in the distance, encircled by seagulls, the noise of traffic on the nearby Richmond-San Rafael Bridge droning overhead.

As we reached the shore, Lim, the former president of Christie’s International Real Estate, jumped from the boat, adeptly hurdling over the waves and landing on dry sand.

“The deepest part of the bay is right there – it’s actually perfect for a yacht,” Lim said as he crunched along the rocky beach in a blue vest and Gucci glasses. A future owner, he surmised, “could also come on a helicopter”.

While “private island” may bring to mind a tropical beach with gleaming white sand, Red Rock Island is something else. The 5.8-acre property is a hunk of red rock, complete with a narrow strip of stony beach and a thriving bird population. When the island hit the market last year, asking price $25m, the news made national headlines.

Lim is the longtime Christie’s realtor now tasked with trying to make this guano-encrusted outcropping appealing to potential billionaire buyers. When Lim launched the sale last November, he positioned it as a “prestigious trophy investment” and a “mysterious and sought-after gem”.

When the Guardian toured the island in June, it had still not sold. Red Rock is something of an outlier in the private island market. It’s far from remote – situated a stone’s throw from the Richmond Bridge, which registers nearly 13m cars each year. While the vistas are sweeping, the island lacks basic amenities, such as running water or electricity.

Then there are the obstacles to future development. Red Rock Island is partially located in three different California counties, which have each zoned it for different uses (residential, industrial and general use). In California, where navigating the regulations of even one local government can be challenging, this could prove a major headache for any future owner.

Still, on that sunny day in June, Lim was optimistic and seemed to genuinely enjoy his adventurous journey to the Rock. In his two decades in Bay Area real estate, Lim had sold quirky properties before, from a San Francisco church to a firehouse turned into a condominium and even a parking spot – but this was his first island.

To him, marketing the island is not so different from many other luxury goods. “It’s like selling a really rare painting,” he said. “It’s one of one – and that is what Christie’s does best.”

Who buys an island?

Despite the island’s central location in the San Francisco Bay, few people even know its name, according to James A Martin, a photographer and author who published a book on Bay Area islands. He said the island had become a bit of a joke in his presentations over the years, lacking the amenities that many private islands boast.

If you have so much money that you can buy this just to preserve in its original form, that might be the greatest flex of all

Chris Lim

“I always tell people: you can buy your own island – but there’s no water, no gas, and you’re going to have to get a building permit from three different counties to do anything. And people driving on the Richmond Bridge will be able to look right in your front room window,” he said.

Red Rock has a colorful history. It was inhabited by the San Francisco businessman Selim E Woodworth in the 1850s, and Russian fur traders before that. It was ultimately taken over by miners seeking to harvest manganese – a mineral that was popular in Europe as an artists’ pigment, and gives the island its namesake red color.

There had been different proposals for developing the island over the past decades, Lim said, from an offer to make it “a beach club with a marina” to plans for “an eco-friendly resort” or “a tourist attraction with a wedding chapel”. Playboy magazine considered purchasing it in the 1970s and using it as the location for a Playboy mansion. The controversial guru and commune leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was reportedly once interested in the island. So were advertisers who wanted to use it for giant billboards .

Martin, the de facto expert on islands in the Bay, said he knew “very little” about such plans – other than that they had never succeeded.

The island is owned by the Durning family, whose late father received Red Rock from his business partner, who purchased it for under $50,000 in the 1960s. The family lived in the Bay Area and once used their island for camping and hiking vacations, like an ordinary vacation house. Lim said Brock Durning, the trustee for the rest of the family, now lived in Alaska, and wanted to sell it to raise funds for his ageing mother’s care.

In an area renowned for ultra-rich residents, Lim and During should, in theory, have a wealth of potential buyers. But while Bay Area tech billionaires have certainly shown an interest in owning islands, they have usually sought properties a bit further from San Francisco: Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a $270m compound with a bunker in Hawaii, while the former Oracle CEO Larry Ellison purchased almost all of Lanai, the sixth-largest island in Hawaii, for several hundred million dollars in 2012.

Private island properties tend to attract “people who value their privacy”, according to Tim Rodlands, who runs a luxury real estate company in the Bahamas, though buyers also include aspiring developers of luxury hotels, Airbnbs, or condos, who “want to create their own utopias”.

“It’s mainly your upper echelon of the 1% of the world,” agreed Danny Prell, vice-president of business development at Concierge Auctions, a luxury real estate auction house. Movie stars and developers are interested, along with “owners of companies, big CEOs, people that you know are on the Forbes list”.

Private islands are available around the world at a wide range of price points, from small wooded isles in Canada for under $1m to Caribbean island estates that can be priced from $30m to $60m, to $150m and above. Islands have an enduring appeal to “ego purchasers, who want to say they own an island”, said Rodlands. The market for islands also boomed during the early pandemic, realtors said, as super-wealthy individuals sought an escape from social conflict and the risk of infection.

The asking price for some private islands is lower than many people might expect: in the Bahamas, it’s possible to buy an “entry level” small island, or cay, for between $600,000 and a few million, Rodlands said.

That puts Red Rock Island somewhere in the mid-range market, but development could drive up the costs significantly. Potential buyers need to consider how they will get construction materials, and construction workers, to their island, and how they will house or transport their staff over the long term.

“You can buy an island for $10m and spend $100m on it doing the infrastructure,” Prell said.

The birds and the billionaires

Back on the island, Lim and the Guardian scrambled over rocks and tried to identify the best way to reach its steep summit, before ultimately abandoning the plan. During the process, a turkey vulture zoomed out of an abandoned mine and soared above us. Fishermen on boats bobbed nearby. Fluffy baby gulls waddled along the shore.

Despite being at the center of such urban environments, the island feels truly untouched, raising the question: when it is purchased, who will it really belong to – a billionaire, or the wildlife that has long called it home?

Over the last year, Lim has shown the island to several “high-profile” potential buyers, including wealthy clients from Miami. One interested buyer who had recently toured the island wanted to leave it exactly as it was, he said.

“If you have so much money that you can buy this just to preserve this in its original form, I think that might be the greatest flex of all,” Lim said.

Now, it appears the island may have found a buyer after all. On 19 July, the island finally went into contract with a buyer who wished to remain anonymous, Lim said. The sale process was not yet complete, and Lim would not comment on the final price or any other details: “We have signed an NDA.”

So, the shape of Red Rock’s future remains open ended. Leaving the island in its natural state is an idea that some local residents can get behind. Casey Skinner, a Bay Area program director with the Audubon Society, said the island had “incredible roosting habitat” for a variety of seabirds, and was an important refuge for “all kinds of wildlife”, including sea mammals and birds needing a place to rest while migrating.

Martin, who had visited the island a handful of times via kayak, said that preserving the island for wildlife would be the best possible outcome.

“I can’t imagine any other purpose that would be beneficial to anybody, or anything,” he said. “Just let the birds take it over.”